Diatribe about US education

Here is my diatribe about US schools -- I feel I can comment since I spent a lot of time working with US educators on computerization, language teaching methods and volunteered several years, while I was working in the States, for Jr. Achievement.

Public schools are the only way to go -- vouchers can work so long as ideologically or religious oriented schools are rigidly excluded.  The home schooling movement, while on rare occasions does work, for the most part leaves the children way behind their contemporaries and with a load of prejudice and misinformation.  There is no good way to use profit incentives in education, as in medicine -- capitalism is the best way to produce most goods and services, but not police, military, education and health.  The incentives are all wrong.

The US does one of the best jobs around of educating the elite -- the doctors and engineers and scientists and architects and accountants and musicians and so on, I think because teachers recognize the "gifted" and work and encourage them.  Also, of course, this has much to do with the high quality of most US universities.

The general public in the US are among the least educated general publics in the world, showing gross ignorance of science and business and economics and so on.  I think that is because teachers, in an environment where there is little possibility of real discipline, merely give up on them and become baby sitters.

It produces poor, money-grubbing lawyers -- that seems to be all that law school there is about, not justice.  Also, since most politicians are drawn from that class, they are also generally "unfortunates."

Finally there are the teaching schools, an almost complete waste of time, where all sorts of theories about how to teach are bandied about from fad to fad.  I think a teacher should be well grounded in the subject being taught, and a few grossly bad potential teachers should be fired, but otherwise I wonder at the credentialism American schools are stuck with, where teaching certificates count more than knowledge of the subject.

Of course one problem is that the teachers are largely unionized -- a guaranteed way to assure mediocrity in any field of endeavor.  Another problem is the amount of money spent, not, it seems, on teacher salaries, but somewhere, since America spends more per student than anywhere else -- by a long shot.  These costs just naturally generate political opposition to spending more money.

Of course there is also politics -- efforts to get all sorts of silly (and sometimes unconstitutional) things into the curriculum, air-heads who want things like ethics and initiative and imagination to be the emphasis, and hard-heads who want nothing more than literacy and numeracy.  That is a perpetual conflict preventing a moderate curriculum.